Andrea Carlson: "MASTHEAD"

MASTHEAD is an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Minneapolis-based artist Andrea Carlson. With various apporaches to media, Carlson has amassed a collection of works on paper spanning a near decade. Collectively, the work assembles into a “grand shipwreck” of ojects, animals and texts strewn on a continuious shore. This presentation is a disembodied narritive as the objects are reduced in context, foreign and symbolic. Carlson's work cites cannibal narratives and film titles as a metaphors for assimilation in the vein of a postcolonial critique. The artist believes that the attitudes of empires are enshrined in their national collections, museums and zoos. Mondo and cannabal-boom genre exploitation film titles are drawn into the works to create the appearance of propaganda in her graphic, poster-style paintings. As the artists states, “The objects and texts represented in my work are displayed hovering like holy icons, floating and centered on the page. As these objects dangle over the seashore like a carrot, the shore rises up, itself fluid, all-consuming and assimilating as the earth takes back and buries it's histories.”